One person's trash is another's treasure

Tue, 06/23/2009 1:22 PM  |  Lifestyle

It's about 5 o'clock on a Monday afternoon and the second floor of a house in Medan, North Sumatra is the site of an interesting combination of activities: Art, business and waste recycling.

The owner of the house, Dewi Budiati TJ Said, and several teenagers are preparing paint, cement and water bottles, to be cleverly transformed into something new.

One boy smears a plastic bottle with cement mixed with sand - a vase in the making. Another youth makes an ashtray out of pulp and colorful cement.

Samples of what these will become are scattered around on the floor, sitting on wooden racks or hanging on the wall: Photo frames, dustbins, "magic" lamps, effigies, vases, ashtrays and wedding souvenirs, all of them made from recycled materials. The materials themselves - all nonorganic rubbish - lie in piles all over the messy 50-square-meter room. The strong smells of paint and cement fill in the air.

Welcome to Dewi's recycling workshop, in Padang Bulan, Medan.

Dewi, now 45, started up the workshop on the second floor of her in 2007, pursuing her idea of transforming items of "rubbish" into useful objects with commercial value.

"At first I did it just to kill time when I was pregnant with my fifth child," she says. "But it turned out that this motivated me and inspired me to create artistic and valuable items from trash, which later also led me to make cheap organic fertilizer for our gardens."

Dewi worked on her recycled goods for two years before she was ready to share her skills with other people, especially socially marginalized people and housewives.

Her point in it all is that, through recycling, people can both make money and save the environment.

There is certainly no shortage of material: Medan produces 1,500 tons of garbage every day.

To help reduce this amount, she teaches people in her area how to separate their household waste, make handicrafts from discarded materials and turn organic waste into compost.

Organic waste - plant and animal material such as leftover vegetables, old rice, manure and bones - decomposes easily.

Non-organic waste is either slow or impossible to breakdown. Some types, such as thick plastics, glass and metal, are usually recyclable. Other types including waxed or laminated paper, such as that used to wrap rice, or plastic mixed with aluminum, such as the type used in snack packaging is very difficult to recycle.

But Dewi can find a use for nearly everything else.

"We can use organic waste to make compost, while non-organic can be transformed into handicrafts," she says.

Many people have benefited from Dewi's lessons in waste management and recycling. One of these is Ainun, whose group produces compost and organic vegetables.

"Thanks to Ibu Dewi," Ainun says, "we can make the most of useless waste and make money."

Dewi also involves local artists in her activities, with whose help she makes effigies of famous people and characters such as Barack Obama, Mr. Bean, Mahatma Gandhi and North Sumatra governor Syamsul Arifin.

"This garbage has united street children, artists and unemployed people in making money," she says. "It is not much, but they can survive on it. You know that many artists in Medan lead a hard life. Here in this workshop, they can work together and make the most of this workshop to produce valuable items."

She recently showed her works in an exhibition themed Medan Green Clean (MCC), which was attended by the Medan governor, to whom she presented an image of himself.

"Hopefully, the amount of garbage produced by this city will decrease, and people will have a stronger spirit to work," said the governor as he received his figurine from Dewi. The exhibition attracted - and educated - many students, such as Ajeng, a junior high school student, who said "We didn't know what handicrafts to make at school, but after visiting this exhibition we realized we could make them from trash."

Dewi is now considering putting the handicrafts in a gallery, which will hold various items made from what was once considered rubbish.

"This will give a real form to the concern of anyone who cares about ensuring a healthy lifestyle by recycling waste," she says.

Dewi's enterprise is part of a growing trend, as the effects of global warming and climate change mean environmental issues become increasingly more important. What people like Dewi teach is that everyone can take part in looking after the environment by reducing waste and avoiding the use of products with excessive packaging and which are difficult to recycle.

And we can start with shampoo packaged in small sachets, which, Dewi says, "is the kind of waste I hate so much".

- Bambang Soedjiartono

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